Trade policy and food security are essentially questions of justice and human rights, and the current system of multilateral rules needs to be judged, not by its promotion of trade liberalisation as an end in itself, but by how far it contributes to reducing food insecurity worldwide. By that criterion the present system is seriously failing.
FAO's latest estimates show that 842 million people were under-nourished across the world in 1999-2001. That includes 10 million in industrialised countries, 34 million in countries in transition, and 798 million in developing countries. What is particularly worrying however are the trends. During the decade since the baseline period of 1990-2, the number of chronically hungry people across the developing world as a whole fell by only 19 million people (a mere 2.3%). Worse, in the second half of the decade, the number of under-nourished actually increased by 18 million. What that means, starkly, is that the World Food Summit goal of halving the number of under-nourished people worldwide by 2015 can now be reached only if this recent negative trend can be reversed and if annual reductions can be accelerated to more than 12 times the average annual decrease achieved so far.
What has brought about this pattern of vast, and scarcely reducing, food insecurity across so much of the world? Trade policy is undoubtedly a major factor, though not the only one. Other relevant factors include population growth, GDP growth per person, access to water, health expenditure as a proportion of GDP, and the proportion of adults infected with HIV/AIDS. In the 3 most recent years, drought has been listed as a cause in 60% of food emergencies. If an adequate and reliable water supply can be secured, irrigation can increase yields by up to 5-fold. As FAO has noted, only 17% of cropland across the world is irrigated, but that 17% produces 40% of the world's food.
Nevertheless, trade policy is central to continuing global food insecurity. The WTO's Agreement on Agriculture, the world's principal international agreement on agricultural trade, has promoted an industrial model of agriculture that has jeopardised food security in developing countries. The global food chain has been increasingly distorted by the disparities in power between global agribusinesses on the one hand and farmers and consumers on the other. This is driving the liberalisation of agriculture and the food trade in directions that are self-defeating for the world's weaker States. Many developing countries have unilaterally liberalised their trade regimes, often as part of structural adjustment programmes, in reforms they are then prevented from reversing by the WTO. A recent UN report on the world's 48 poorest countries showed that although they had opened their economies to imports and switched their crop cultivation to exports, poverty had actually deepened. This is scarcely surprising when there has been no reciprocal liberalisation in the North and when, in a massive breach of faith, the industrialised countries have recently pushed the level of their agricultural subsidies, already absurdly high, even higher still, thus driving millions of farmers in the Third World out of their livelihood.
In the Uruguay Round on agriculture, rich countries pledged to cut farm subsidies by about 25% by 2001, thus allowing rich and poor countries to trade on a much more open and fairer basis. In practice however OECD countries have increased subsidies by some 5-10% over the last 15 years, so much so that their total level of support to their own agriculture now stands at some $300 bn a year - twice the total wealth of all least developed countries and 6 times the total current annual level of ODA to all poor countries. They achieved this grotesque parody of a level playing field by arguing in the Uruguay negotiations that only so-called 'trade distorting' subsidies (i.e. Amber Box subsidies as used by poor countries) must be cut, while they insisted that their own Green Box and Blue Box subsidies were allowable because they claimed they did not affect, or only partially affected, production or trade.
The effect has been to create excessive distortions in global food markets. World Bank as well as WTO pressures have forced India, for example, to reduce its subsidies to only some £6 a year per farm on average, while in the EU, by contrast, wheat farmers currently get a subsidy of about £35 per tonne and the CAP offers a support price for sugar growers in the EU 3-4 times above that prevailing on world markets. Subsidies on this scale have intensified agricultural over-production in the rich countries and allowed the EU and US to sell crops at artificially low prices, in effect dumping their surpluses on to world markets at less than the cost of production.
Conversely, many of the poorest countries which rely on preferential access to developed country markets have found that this has been eroded by the Agreement on Agriculture and other free trade agreements. Provision for 'special and differential treatment' for these countries has been systematically watered down, and now involves little more than exemptions for the least developed countries, and longer transition periods for other developing countries. What is clearly needed is the introduction of a Development Box into the AoA to protect small farmers and the production of food security crops. In addition, the 'best endeavour' clauses in the existing 'special and differential' provisions should be converted into binding operational requirements within the A0A.
The fundamental need is for reform of the WTO to turn it into an institution that works for development, poverty reduction and food security instead of, as today, a mechanism to enforce the ideology of free trade per se, whatever the cost. The WTO should therefore publicly state that the achievement of the MDG poverty halving target by 2015 is an explicit objective of its work. The AoA should equally commit itself publicly to the World Food Summit target of halving world hunger by the same date. There should then be a global Ministerial Forum every year or two years to examine, for each major region of the world, whether plans to achieve these objectives by 2015 are on track, and where they are not, to identify the cause - managerial, financial, logistical or whatever - and put in place the necessary measures to correct the failure to bring plans back on track.
Specifically, if food security is genuinely to be the priority, developing countries, and particularly the new Group of 21 post-Cancun, need to make it unambiguously clear that there will be no agreement to any further trade round until the rich countries provide cast-iron guarantees to reduce, by given proportions within an agreed timescale, their excessive levels of domestic support and export subsidy for agricultural products. If these commitments were broken - as happened with the monstrously protectionist US Farm Bill 2002 after the Doha agreement in November 2001 to reduce subsidies - then developing countries should make clear that any trade liberalisation measures in their countries will be promptly stopped and put into reverse, in order to protect their economies, their small farmers and their production of food security crops. This must be linked with clear, quantified and dated targets for increased access to rich country markets for developing country exports, especially those produced largely by small farmers. And extra help needs to be specified for those poorest countries that have seen their preferential trade agreements eroded by broader tariff reductions. As a last resort the Marrakesh Decision should be made operational by using a given world food price to trigger access to international aid for food purchases.
In addition, the TRIPS Agreement on trade-related intellectual property rights is in urgent need of reform because it restricts public access to genetic resources and undermines food security in developing countries. The current substantive review of Article 27.3(b) of TRIPS should be used to exclude all life forms from patenting. It should also ensure consistency between TRIPS and the Convention on Biological Diversity by ensuring free and fair access to genetic resources, by requiring prior and informed consent, and by guaranteeing benefit sharing. And it should be used to stop the development and commercial application of 'terminator technologies' which, whatever localised pretext is given for their use, are fundamentally aimed to enmesh millions of farmers in developing countries in annually repurchasing seeds and pesticides from global agribusinesses, instead of saving seed as farmers have done worldwide from time immemorial.
But food insecurity is not confined to the developing world. According to the FAO, the US, the world's largest food producer, still has some 11 million people who are food insecure and hungry, including 4 million children, and a further 23 million people, about 8% of the population, who are food insecure without hunger. In the UK some 14 million people are still living on incomes below half the national average, often taken as denoting the threshold of poverty, and can typically afford less than £2 per day for their food and hardly even £1 per day for a child. As more supermarket shopping takes place out of town, they cannot reach these without cars. Yet, paradoxically, attempts to address food security issues via community-supported agriculture schemes, food cooperatives and farmers' markets are patronised more by higher income groups than by poorer households.
Food security in the UK and other developed economies is facing a watershed - whether to commit to a sustainable farming and food system or to become ever more deeply entrenched in a globalized food economy. So far in the UK efforts have been made to finesse both positions, incompatible though they are. The UK remains in the vanguard of EU efforts to reform the CAP production-based agricultural subsidy system, but without any serious attempt to reduce or replace the long-distance, environmentally polluting, highly mechanised structure of the global food chain. On the other hand, it strongly promoted the idea of sustainable farming via the Curry Commission report in 2002, though it failed to shift the subsidy system decisively so as to give real impetus to the alternative of localised, high-quality, more environmentally compatible food and farming systems. In particular, the UK has embraced both an Organic Action Plan to accelerate the shift to organic farming which the public favours and at the same time has given its approval to the growing of GM maize as the precursor to the wider cultivation of other GM crops in this country. Ironically, the withdrawal just announced of this GM maize by the biotech company concerned, Bayer, reveals the irreconcilability of this technology and its consequences, in the form of cross-contamination, with the economic demands enforced by public hostility, in this case a statutory liability system funded by the GM industry itself.
Given the lack of consumer benefits from GM and the unpredictable downside risks in the almost total absence of health and environmental testing of GM foods, this may mark a significant early milestone in the shift away from the highly mechanised, technologically driven UK and EU agriculture over the last half century towards a more specialised, niche quality, nutritionally health-conscious, environmentally sensitive farming system. But if so, it will require a wholesale new approach to the production, distribution and sale of foodstuffs which can counter both the growing incidence of obesity on the one hand and tackle the still large remaining problem of food insecurity amongst a quarter of the population on the other. That is the next big challenge in the UK.
